Environmental Roundtables are facilitated discussions of important environmental issues, hosted by the Loyola University Environment Program. Facilitators include Environment Program Students, Faculty and guest hosts.

Dr. Joon Heo, Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, will be giving a presentation on “Mapping Matters: Use of GIS Tools for Environmental Problem Solving.”

The use of Geographical Information System (GIS) applications are arguably the most important tools we have today to summarize, analyze, and visualize geographic data, or data that occurs over space and time. In fact, any sets of data (from physical features of our world to patterns of biodiversity, to social/political/ cultural information for the people who live or move about our planet can be mapped. In a world full of big, publicly available datasets, as well as new ones that anyone can generate with GPS coordinates, GIS methods are tools to describe and solve all manner of environmental, social, political, scientific challenges and problem-solving.